How would you go about updating firefox in LMDE? When I used the 32 bit version I seem to remember firefox allowing me to update to a new version through its internal mechanism,if I ran it with root privileges. Now it seems the only way to update it would be to wait for it to hit the mint repos ? Other than downloading it manually I mean.

i wouldn't really expect firefox to be updated anytime soon as its in the mint repos and well they have been typically very slow to pipe down new versions of the applications ... i'd expect iceweasel 4.0 from experimental to hit Sid soon then obviously testing soon there after ...

Updating firefox internally isn't such a great idea you'll eventually get some breakage that way

I use chromium on a daily basis. I was however hoping to update to FF 4.0 as soon as it was available.Internal updates may break something (although it hasn't happened before) and that's fine; the fact that I can't update firefox this way is causing me distress.

I have seen some threads in the LMDE section of the forum where people gave advice about updating firefox by running it with root privileges so I know the option existed at one point in time. Was it only available for the 32 bit version? The update button is missing entirely,not just grayed out. I wonder if adding an Ubuntu repo to keep FF update would be very risky...

It appears that in a recent Mint update they removed the update button from Firefox. Until then you could update it by running it with root privileges and clicking the update button. Now it does not look like you can do this. Possibly uninstalling Mint's version and install Firefox from Mozilla would allow you do to this again.

I've been wondering the same thing. I multi-boot a lot doing various package testing and I notice that those distros where I installed Firefox 3.6.* using the tar.bz2 are now up to 3.6.15 (.14 only lasted for about a week).

3.6.15 didn't address any specific security issues:

Firefox 3.6.15 fixes the following issues found in previous versions of Firefox 3.6:

* Fixed an issue where some Java applets would fail to load in Firefox 3.6.14

But 3.6.14 did:

Firefox 3.6.14 fixes the following issues found in previous versions of Firefox 3.6:

iuliuscezar wrote:I wonder if adding an Ubuntu repo to keep FF update would be very risky...

Yes, adding an Ubuntu repo would be extremely risky and possibly set you up for failure in the future. Ubuntu and LMDE are not compatible. Debian and LMDE are compatible. Mixing repos of non-compatible operating systems is a bad option. Probably better to just download and compile from source if you cannot find a compatible Debian repo with FF 4.0b.

Then I made a link to it on my menu using this path in the launcher. "/home/user/.mozilla/firefox 4 beta/firefox/firefox"

Now I have two shortcuts. One for FF 3.6 and the other for FF 4 Beta. They both share the same profile so the bookmarks and extensions are still there. It even updates by going to Help, About. It checks and installs new versions automatically.

I just used the Ubuntu daily build PPA to install the beta and I'll be using the stable PPA once FF4 is officially released.I know Ubuntu and Debian have a binary compatibility issue although the dependencies are the same.However,I doubt you would break your system if you used Ubuntu repositories for updating critical parts of your Debian installation. I hardly think a browser installed through the Ubuntu repositories would spell disaster for me.I've read that many Debian users have an Ubuntu ppa or two to keep certain apps updated because they find Debian's release cycle to be a bit slow and their OS apparently without any problems. Of course that's no guarantee and seeing how I'm not a software engineer I might not understand all the principles of an OS but Linux seems pretty robust that adding one minor repository will not break your system.

Anyway,installing FF from mozilla directly seems like the better alternative since it allows you to install it without any fear of breaking your system and you can update it at your leisure.

The reason why I chose the Ubuntu PPA is that running FF from the official installation tarball has a problem with my 64 bit machine and refuses to properly render using gtk2 and so it looks really ugly and I was too lazy to compile it from source .